When WoW Tanks Go Rogue

5 November, 2013. 667 words.

I had an odd, somewhat amusing experience in WoW recently. I’ve been playing a lot of dungeon instances lately, partly because I’ve never actually done any WoW dungeons before, and partly because I wanted to level a mage without going through the hassle of soloing. Almost every instance has been an enjoyable, workmanlike experience … until this tank decided to be an ass.

So the random dungeon selector came up with the Scarlet Monastary. Or maybe it was the Scarlet Halls. I can’t remember. They all run together. It was the one that starts out with those piles of corpses and zombies which most people just run around, but the second we stepped into this instance we were beset by flaming zombies and fighting for our lives. That usually happens when somebody doesn’t circumvent that first area, so I figured somebody was trying to do a quest I didn’t know about, or somebody was panicking, or somebody just didn’t know what was going on.

It went on and on … and I’m getting hit over and over, and I start thinking that this tank is not holding aggro very well, which is annoying but it happens. Then I notice someone running all around pulling mobs all over the place, while the other four of us are standing literally in the exact spot where you zone in fighting a swarm of mobs. I thought it was a panicking DPS trying to get away from people hitting him, because DPS tend to freak out whenever someone lands a hit on them.

We got through that, probably thanks to the fantastic work of the healer. (I just know it wasn’t any fantastic work from me; my mage seems largely useless to me.) Then we move forward … and it happens again. We got swarmed with mobs and the tank wasn’t holding aggro.

That’s when I saw it: The tank was running all over pulling mobs … and not fighting them. The rest of us engaged the mobs when we saw the tank pulling, as anyone would, and then the mobs immediately turned and attacked us. It was especially bad with the first boss. Now normally I give tanks a lot of slack, because it’s a crap job that nobody wants to do. But this went far beyond bad tanking.

This tank was trolling us.

Now I suppose it’s possible that somebody’s 5-year-old kid hijacked their account and jumped into a dungeon as a tank and wandered around aimlessly sight-seeing, not even realizing that he or she was playing a game with other people. But that seems like a stretch.

Now here’s why this is a particularly heinous troll: If you’re not a tank, you’ve probably been waiting in the LFG queue for a while, so it’s quite a letdown to find out that time’s been wasted. And if you kick the tank, you run the risk of not getting another one anytime soon, because, as we all know, tanks are the least desirable position to play in a PUG. So you end up having to run the rest of the instance without a tank anyway.

The other problem is that apparently you can’t vote-kick someone if they are in combat or recently in combat. So this dude could just keep engaging mobs indefinitely to avoid getting kicked.

Eventually we all collectively realized that if we stopped attacking any mobs ourselves, the mobs would keep hitting the tank and eventually he would die, and then we could vote-kick him. Which is what ended up happening, because this tank apparently had no ability to heal himself. We then soldiered on through the rest of the instance by ourselves, because sure enough, no new tank arrived. We used someone’s VoidWalker as a sort-of substitute tank. It was messy and slow, but we got through it. Amazingly, none of the other four of us died during the entire time, which I guess goes to show just how easy WoW instances are below level 30.

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